Popular commercial services such as Google, eBay, Amazon, and Netflixhave evolved quickly over the last decade to help people find what theywant, developing information retrieval strategies such as usefullyranked results, spelling correction, and recommendations. Librarycatalogs, in contrast, have changed little and are not well equipped tomeet changing needs and expectations.

The Melvyl Recommender Project explored methods and feasibility ofclosing this gap. An additional extension project to the MelvylRecommender Project carried out deeper explorations into the mostinteresting and promising questions raised during the original project,and to add obvious missing pieces of functionality. The principal areaof investigation was the impact of adding full-text objects to what hadpreviously been a metadata-only index.